Only one of the Afghan National Army's 23 brigades is capable of operating without U.S. or NATO military assistance, the New York Times reported, following the release Monday of a Pentagon report to Congress.

A recent comment by an U.S. Army officer about looking for "children with potential hostile intent" has increased concerns about targeting policy and the killing of civilians in Afghanistan. The statement was attributed to Army Lieutenant Colonel Marion Carrington in a Marine Corps Times article

More than 3,000 U.S. military personnel have secretly returned to Iraq via Kuwait and 17,000 more are on their way in response to the civil war in Syria that has spilled over into northern Iraq, according to a report published Monday by Iran's Press TV.

So great is the deference Americans pay to the office of president of the United States that it must be a rare event when a United States senator, summoned to the White House for a conference, pounds his fist on the president's desk and demands answers

The nation may or may not go over the "fiscal cliff," but RepublicanJim DeMint will be going off the hill in January. The South Carolina senator announced Thursday he will resign his Senate seat next month to become president of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.

Another U.S. warship moved into waters off the coast of Syria Thursday, according to the Russian-based television network RT, while Syria's deputy foreign minister accused Western nations of stirring up fears of chemical weapons as a "pretext for invasion."

In a Middle East triangle more dangerous than the romantic affairs of Generals Petraeus and Allen, the United States is leaning on Iraq to stop the shipment of arms from Iran to Syria, while the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is battling to hold power against rebel forces that have the diplomatic backing of the United States and other western nations.

Testifying on the harshness of his two and a half years of pretrial confinement, Army Pfc Bradley Manning, accused of leaking tens of thousands of classified documents to online news source Wikileaks, acknowledged this week that he had tied a bed sheet into a noose when contemplating suicide during his imprisonment in Kuwait.

Journalist, author and three-time presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan reminisced about his half-century in journalism Thursday night, while lamenting what he described as the decline of the "e pluribus unum" (out of many, one) ethos in America.

Despite the reelection this month of a president whose primary legislative achievement has been the enactment of a national healthcare program, a majority of Americans now believe it is not the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage, according to a new Gallup poll.